Thoughts on a lathe gib

[alanganes]

The fact that a scraped surface holds oil makes sense, though it seems funny to me that it would be done on a machine like this for just that purpose. The ways were clearly not scraped, and unless the gib were ground to a highly polished state (like a gage block) there would still be some of that I'd think. The marks on this do not have the regular patterned look of hand flaking.

I can see it being done to take off high spots, but if that was the primary reason it seems a pretty slow way to achieve something that could be done by surface grinding it. Particularly since while this is a fairly decent machine for it's era and what it is, it was clearly never in the "cost is no object" class of machine like a Hardinge or something.

I'm not discounting those thoughts, just an interesting thing to chew on. I've taken a few old and not so old machine tools of various US and Asian manufacturers apart along the way (no pun...), and have never seen a scraped gib before. It sort of jumped out at me as unusual. I'm sure many here have seen their share of disassembled machine tools, have you guys seen scraped gibs on your machines? It's not impossible that I am just grossly unobservant and this is just donning on me...

Thanks for chiming it!